The Tournament Read Online Free Page B

play or at least perspires while engaging in it? Chess is but a parlour game which fails on both counts.’
    ‘A parlour game! A parlour game!’ Mr Ascham exclaimed indignantly. But instead of arguing the matter further with me, he simply nodded in acquiescence. ‘All right. Let us accept your definition for now, and from our observations of the upcoming tournament, let us see if chess qualifies as a sport in accordance with it.’
    While they played their nightly matches, Mr Ascham and Mr Giles would converse casually—discussing that day’s journey or the rise of Martin Luther or any other matter that took their interest.
    I admired the easy way they chatted. They were, quite simply, good friends: so comfortable with each other that they could talk about anything, from honest advice to criticism. One day, as I rode on Mr Ascham’s horse with him, I asked him how and when he and Mr Giles had become friends.
    My teacher laughed softly. ‘We were both hopelessly in love with the same girl.’
    ‘You were rivals and now you are the best of friends? I don’t understand.’
    ‘She was a local debutante and the most beautiful girl in all of Cambridge.’ Mr Ascham shook his head. ‘Beautiful but also wilful. Giles and I were students, brash and young. We competed shamelessly for her affections—I with awful love poems, he with flowers and wit—and she happily accepted both of our advances before she ran off and married the heir to a vast estate who turned out to be a drunk and a fool and who eventually lost all his lands to a moneylender. I don’t know what became of her but out of our combined failure Giles and I became firm friends.’
    ‘And now he teaches at Cambridge?’
    ‘Yes. Secular philosophy. William of Occam, Aquinas, Duns Scotus, that sort of thing.’
    ‘And he is a bachelor like you, is he not?’ I asked, trying my best to sound innocent. Elsie was particularly curious about this. She thought Mr Giles quite fetching, ‘in an intellectual kind of way’.
    ‘Indeed he is,’ Mr Ascham said, ‘but unlike me, not by choice. Giles was married once—to the daughter of his philosophy professor, a brilliant and delightful girl named Charlotte Page. Charlotte’s father allowed her to sit in on his lectures, hiding at the back of the room, and thus she learned everything the boys did. She was a match for any of them and Giles simply adored her. They married, but a year after they were wed, she took ill with the plague and died at the age of twenty-one. Giles has shown no interest in courting since.’
    I looked over at Mr Giles riding on his horse nearby, staring idly at the landscape, lost in thought, and I wondered if he was thinking about her. ‘Poor Mr Giles.’
    Mr Ascham smiled grimly. ‘Yes. But then, is it better to love deeply and truly for a short while than to never love at all?’
    I didn’t know. At that stage in my life, boys were an oddity. Whereas only a year before I had found them annoying, now I found them intriguing. The idea of actually loving one, however, was a vague notion at best.
    ‘Is this why you are a bachelor?’ I asked. ‘Are you waiting for a similar all-abiding love?’
    ‘I may well be,’ my teacher said. ‘But the real reason is that I have certain projects I wish to complete before I settle down.’
    ‘Such as?’
    ‘Well, for one thing, you.’

THE HABSBURG LANDS
    AT LENGTH WE VENTURED ACROSS BURGUNDY , through the Rhine Valley, and into the lands of the Habsburgs.
    Moving in a wide arc around the mountains that guard the Swiss Confederation, we passed through thick forests and spectacular valleys and beheld the soaring castles of the Germanic nobility.
    I imagine that I travelled with a permanent expression of wonder on my face—every day of our journey brought new sights, new peoples, new cultures.
    In the Habsburg lands, our lodgings improved. Through a labyrinthine network of intermarriage that not even the Astronomer Royal could calculate, my